Still, I think the odds he actually is forced to pay almost any of this are vanishingly small.

Still a lot of "if's" here!

And doesn't the responsibility to pay up remain for money made after the bankruptcy event? Or does declaring bankruptcy ensure a clean slate such that income from new ventures is safe from being confiscated?

A bankruptcy discharge does usually ensure a clean slate for new ventures. However, some types of debt are "nondischargeable" and can survive a bankruptcy. That includes "intentional torts" like these instances of defamation. So, it's likely that these plaintiffs/creditors will be able to go after his new ventures.

Still however, I wish the laws were more selective about which funds are ripe for being taken from. E.g., Alex Jones should have to pay up for money that was made from the source of the problem (the podcasts in this case), if he had, say, funds attained from a side-business of roofing, those should be untouched. And if he continues with his roofing business, maybe we shouldn't be taking all of those funds. Otherwise, I fear we are disincentivizing them to be good and upstanding contributors to society. As losing defendants of these battles are likely to be a perilous group, the issue probably deserves more careful handling. What are your thoughts?

Not if you have lived in Florida for the past 40 months[0], which is why many professional athletes change their residency to Florida and start the clock on the day they sign their professional contract. It appears Alex missed a trick here.

[0]https://www.floridabankruptcynow.com/floridas-homestead-exem...

You could take everything I own and prevent me from ever earning another dollar and it wouldn't be $64 million dollars.

I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. The US government values a human life at $10 million, is this 6x worse than what the killer did?

You're massively underestimating both the impact of Jones's behavior and the value of a lifetime of earnings for many two earner families.

Assume both parents were the equivalent of senior SWEs at google and now cannot work. The assumption that they can no longer work is not an unreasonable assumption; their children were slaughtered and then they were threatened by angry mobs for years (and still are). I wouldn't be able to hold down a job.

$64M * 2% = $1,300,000 per year safe withdrawal. (The 4% rule is good if you are retired, but 2% is more realistic if you're eg in your early 30s.)

$1,300,000 / 2 = $640,000 income per earner.

Subtract $20,000 per person to compensate for typical healthcare and retirement benefits [1]. Actually that's a lower bound because of tax implications. We're now at $620,000 per earner.

I'm actually surprised that there aren't at least a few families for whom the number is higher; eg two surgeons, a surgeon and a lawfirm partner, a principal engineer and a VP, etc. would all have lost far more than $640K/yr/earner. These aren't typical pairings, but they're also not particularly rare, and the Sandy Hook community's family median income is nearly 2x the national average so it's the type of place you might expect to find these sorts of people over-represented.

So anyways, we are already within the Senior FAANG salary range and haven't even considered the various serious damages caused by Jones's behavior, beyond his victims' inability to hold down fairly normal upper middle class jobs. Many of them had to move multiple times, probably now have serious and life-long mental health issues from the harassment piles on top of trauma, etc. Once you include those damages, you probably end up with that $64M principal translating to something that is not far from the median family income for Sandy Hook.

[1] eg, https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits

I think people in this thread are massively underestimating the value of a lifetime of labor. This number is perfectly compensatory for eg a married couple that are both MDs, biglaw lawyers, FAANG engineers, finance professionals, or any number of other well-paying white collar jobs.

Being threatened the way that these families have -- after losing my child -- would absolutely wreck my mental health. There's no way that I or my wife would be able to live a normal life after the type of harassment incited by Jones. Certainly not hold down a job while looking over our shoulders and processing the trauma of losing a child and being hunted down by wackos in the aftermath.

The safe withdrawal rate on $64,000,000 when you're decades away from retirement age is probably closer to 2% than 4%, which puts us at $1,280,000 per year. That's $640,000 per earner. As a Senior at a FAANG -- which probably isn't my terminal level -- my income + benefits are north of this number.

Now allocate 1/3-1/2 of that $1.2M/yr to personal security and the cost of not having employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement benefits and you're already down to the equivalent of perhaps $250,000 - $400,000 per earner. That's fairly believable. And my only operating assumption is that this sort of trauma makes maintaining a white collar career path difficult/impossible.

And there are lots of other recurring expenses even aside from personal security associated with being hounded by a mob of armed wackos. I'd bet we would get down to $100,000 - $150,000 per earner per year of safe withdrawal income after extraneous expenses.

If I had to guess, the judge isn't going that much further than simply compensating these families for the cost of losing a lifetime of two normal incomes and compensation for other things that are necessary due to Jones's behavior.